* 'Pre-N' certification has little meaning for enterprises
There has been much discourse about the Wi-Fi Alliance’s decision to certify “draft 802.11n” high-speed wireless LAN products far ahead of formal IEEE standards ratification. Many buy the argument that the group set a precedent when it certified separate components of 802.11i, the WLAN standard security suite, ahead of standards approval.
Personally, I don’t think the analogy holds up.
Circa 2001, there arose a very real Wi-Fi security problem that needed solving as soon as humanly possible. Enterprise-class WLANs were already installed when it was discovered that the security mechanism they used, Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP – was a broken lock. WEP represented a time bomb waiting to blow the privacy off business installations already in commercial use.
It was in the overall industry’s best interest to get the best standards-based security fix out there as fast as possible, even if it had to come in two parts: Wi-Fi Protected Access, then WPA enhanced with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a.k.a. WPA2. But each of these pieces of the 802.11i security standard was considered complete before interoperability testing and certification took place (unlike the situation with 802.11n, a standard now expected to be ratified in 2008). In fact, both WPA and WPA2 continue to be considered acceptable forms of 802.11-standard security today.
The 802.11n issue, by contrast, is more about politics than filling a pressing industry need, particularly in the enterprise. Few business networks yet require 802.11n, which promises greater Wi-Fi speeds and range. Rather, product vendors want to market high-speed systems that they developed too early and are seeking validation from a prominent industry organization (one to which they happen to pay membership fees) in order to do so.
Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, counters that the need for 802.11n is more immediate in home networks than in the enterprise, adding that he expects Draft 2.0 of 802.11n to be fairly stable before the alliance starts certifying the interoperability of 2.0-based products next year.
“When you move beyond a single AP in the home environment [to extend range], the associated complexity is often beyond the average user,” he says. “[The greater range] with 11n precludes having to buy directional antennas, install extra APs and having to be more of a network administrator than most consumers want to be,” he says.
There’s definitely some truth to this. For a sample case, read the recent two-part Network World “Wide Area Networking” newsletters by Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, “Be wary of Wi-Fi when supporting teleworkers” (Part 1 – Part 2). The authors describe a user befuddled by how to extend her AP range to reach her wireless cable modem and the inability of her cable company, which supplied the Wi-Fi network as part of a turnkey offering, to offer any assistance.
What will be interesting is to see which Draft-N products the alliance is able to certify as interoperable. Keith Shaw, Network World senior editor of product testing, recently oversaw Network World’s testing of products based on 802.11n’s multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) technology. Though he praised the range and speed of the products tested in a podcast last week, when it came to multivendor products working with each other, he said, “Interoperability stinks.”
